#God of war ascension info series#

That leaves only characters you can’t think of, like the aforementioned Hechitonchires. So is Ares ( GOW I), Cronos ( GOW III), Gaia ( GOW III), Hades ( GOW III), Poseidon ( GOW III), and damn near everyone else you can think of. Kratos can’t fight Zeus in Ascension because he won’t do that until God of Wars II and III. Structuring Ascension as a prequel also preemptively evades the responsibility of determining what happens next.Įven so, the game remains mired in its own continuity. The visuals are equally impressive, indicating that God of War is yet to suffer from any aesthetic malaise. Ascension plays extremely well, delivering everything you’ve come to expect from a franchise that has always featured exemplary combat. Having played the game, those three years are reflected in the finished product. That much time and care has been put into new mechanics,” Palamarchuk boasted. “There have only been two God of Wars on PS3. The unstated subtext is that fans should care because the developers still care, which is no small endorsement coming from a studio with such a sterling reputation. The trick is persuading audiences to provide the same level of enthusiasm in the absence of the more famous icons of mythology. Nothing is ruled out until it absolutely, positively can’t be squeezed into the game, and while some practical concessions are inevitable, new material is nonetheless added throughout the final stages of development. However, that creative liberation – and the dialogue that follows – helped the development team reinvest in the world of Ancient Greece. The rotating cube idea didn’t make it through production and is one of many outlandish set pieces left on the cutting room floor. “It’s back and forth until we finally decide what we can pull off and what we can put our budget behind.” “Our programming team kept saying, ‘You can’t do this.’ Design would go work on it for a few months and come back with something even crazier.

“The gravity kept breaking,” lamented Palamarchuk, although it apparently shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The original design called for a rotating cube with shifting gravity even though the game’s engine isn’t built to accommodate randomly selected 83 and 15 and 41.2-degree playing surfaces. Take, for instance, a proposed boss encounter with the Hecatonchires, three giants with 150 heads noted for their overthrow of the Titans. “What’s the coolest idea we can think of? We take that and try to figure out how we can make that work.

#God of war ascension info series#

A Lead Environment Artist at Sony Santa Monica, Palamarchuk has been with the franchise since God of War II and believes the studio’s uninhibited approach has allowed the series to stay relevant more than a decade after inception. “We don’t care about ‘is it going to work?’” said John Palamarchuk at the recent God of War: Ascension preview at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The answer, it turns out, is to abandon any semblance of logic. Zeus is dead after being liquefied at the end of God of War III, leaving fewer and fewer remaining justifications for vast fixed-camera panoramas and colossal boss battles with the literal gods and titans of mythology.Īs a developer, how do you stay motivated when you’ve already dismantled that Pantheon? God of War: Ascension marks Kratos’ fourth core console outing in Sony’s God of War franchise, and at a glance it appears like a reboot of a classic film with a weaker supporting cast.